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“In the drawings you’ve been looking at I think my types are very handsome.”

“Oh they won’t do!”

“I’ve been working with new models.”

“I see you have. Theywon’t do.”

“Are you very sure of that?”

“Absolutely–they’re stupid.”

“You mean I am–for I ought to get round that.”

“You can’t–with such people. Who are they?”

I told him, so far as was necessary, and he concluded heartlessly: “Ce sont des gens qu’il faut mettre a la porte.”

“You’ve never seen them; they’re awfully good”–I flew to their defence.

“Not seen them? Why all this recent work of yours drops to pieces with them. It’s all I want to see of them.”

“No one else has said anything against it–the Cheapsidepeople are pleased.”

“Everyone else is an ass, and the Cheapsidepeople the biggest asses of all. Come, don’t pretend at this time of day to have pretty illusions about the public, especially about publishers and editors. It’s not for suchanimals you work–it’s for those who know, coloro che sanno; so keep straight for meif you can’t keep straight for yourself. There was a certain sort of thing you used to try for–and a very good thing it was. but this twaddle isn’t init.” When I talked with Hawley later about “Rutland Ramsay” and its possible successors he declared that I must get back into my boat again or I should go to the bottom. His voice in short was the voice of a warning.

I noted the warning, but I didn’t turn my friends out of doors. They bored me a good deal; but the very fact that they bored me admonished me not to sacrifice them–if there was anything to be done with them–simply to irritation. As I look back at this phase they seem to me to have pervaded my life not a little. I have a vision of them as most of the time in my studio, seated against the wall on an old velvet bench to be out of the way, and resembling the while a pair of patient courtiers in a royal ante-chamber. I’m convinced that during the coldest weeks of the winter they held their ground because it saved them fire. Their newness was losing its gloss, and it was impossible not to feel them objects of charity. Whenever Miss Churm arrived they went away, and after I was fairly launched in “Rutland Ramsay” Miss Churm arrived pretty often. They managed to express to me tacitly that they supposed I wanted her for the low life of the book, and I let them suppose it, since they had attempted to study the work–it was lying about the studio–without discovering that it dealt only with the highest circles. They had dipped into the most brilliant
of our novelists without deciphering many passages. I still took an hour from them, now and again, in spite of Jack Hawley’s warning: it would be time enough to dismiss them, if dismissal should be necessary, when the rigour of the season was over. Hawley had made their acquaintance–he had met them at my fireside–and thought them a ridiculous pair. Learning that he was a painter they tried to approach him, to show him too that they were the real thing; but he looked at them, across the big room, as if they were miles away: they were a compendium of everything he most objected to in the social system of his country. Such people as that, all convention and patent-leather, with ejaculations that stopped conversation, had no business in a studio. A studio was a place to learn to see, and how could you see through a pair of feather-beds?

The main inconvenience I suffered at their hands was that at first I was shy of letting it break upon them that my artful little servant had begun to sit to me for “Rutland Ramsay.” They knew I had been odd enough–they were prepared by this time to allow oddity to artists–to pick a foreign vagabond out of the streets when I might have had a person with whiskers and credentials, but it was some time before they learned how high I rated his accomplishments. They found him in an attitude more than once, but they never doubted I was doing him as an organ-grinder. There were several things they never guessed, and one of them was that for a striking scene in the novel, in which a footman briefly figured, it occurred to me to make sure of Major Monarch as the menial. I kept putting this off, I didn’t like to ask him to don the livery–besides the difficulty of finding a livery to fit him. At last, one day late in the winter, when I was at work on the despised Oronte, who caught one’s idea on the wing, and was in the glow of feeling myself go very straight, they came in, the Major and his wife, with their society laugh about nothing (there was less and less to laugh at); came in like country-callers–they always reminded me of that–who have walked across the park after church and are presently persuaded to stay to luncheon. Luncheon was over, but they could stay to tea–I knew they wanted it. The fit was on me, however, and I couldn’t let my ardour cool and my work wait, with the fading daylight, while my model prepared it. So I asked Mrs. Monarch if she would mind laying it out–a request which for an instant brought all the blood to her face. Her eyes were on her husband’s for a second, and some mute telegraphy passed between them. Their folly was over the next instant; his cheerful shrewdness put an end to it. So far from pitying their wounded pride, I must add, I was moved to give it as complete a lesson as I could. They bustled about together and got out the cups and saucers and made the kettle boil. I know they felt as if they were waiting on my servant, and when the tea was prepared I said: “He’ll have a cup, please–he’s tired.” Mrs. Monarch brought him one where he stood, and he took it from her as if he had been a gentleman at a party squeezing a crush-hat with an elbow.